The number of documentaries and news bulletins hitting our tv channels featuring examples of confused, frightened, checked-out, bewildered, stupefied elderly people in various scenarios – hospitals, homes for the aged, for dementia, receiving care at home, at the clinic – is increasing at an alarming rate. As the demographic balance continues to tip ever more steeply towards this age group, it’s possible that the matter of aged care will rapidly become the new reality tv. Fly-on-the-wall documentaries, tear-inducing interviews, shock-horror exposés of victimhood and/or abuse, balanced up with strategists, philanthropists, innovators and early adopters all promoting new aged care paradigms. It all makes for good TV.
But just watch. It will have its own shelf life. What was once shocking will become mainstream and we will become inured to the pathos, to the suffering in each individual human story. Just as war, famine, natural disaster and genocide have become regular and familiar in our news programmes, so will the fate of the elderly become mainstream and lose its edge on our conscience. So on one level we will no longer feel affected.
But just how far will we have lost connection to what is truly important in humanity when an example of the overall disregard and disservice we are dishing up to our elderly can be conveniently channel-switched out of our consciousness? People just like us who are still like us, were us in their day, now just older, less quick, less agile, less open to change, more fearful of it, of us and of themselves? What an intolerable, unloving way to go, to leave this world we’ve called home; the journey out a process of waiting, fearing, hoping, praying. Because it’s an unknown for each one of us. What’s going to carry me off? Will it be intensely painful, long drawn out with inescapable suffering and sickness? Who will look after me if so and will I be able to afford prolonged quality care? Or will I be blessed with a quick exit or even better, just not wake up one morning?
Old people feel they still have a voice and want to be heard. It’s just that people aren’t listening. Sure there are policies, programmes, strategies and plans for supporting elderly people with needs and that’s totally right and proper. And increasingly, at long last, at the core of these interventions are found the beginnings of values espousing respect and dignity in care. But these are synthetic, bolt-on values. Why? Because our culture does not automatically promote or demand acknowledgement, appreciation or respect for the elderly, so it is unsurprising that true regard for the quality of their wellbeing is not foundational to our custom and practice. That does not make it right, though.
Time was when elders were revered for their wisdom, knowledge and experience, a point of access to answers on the bigger questions in life. Time was when, whilst not at all rose-tinted in its reality, our elders could nonetheless live their remaining years, days and hours within the family unit, usually a larger family admittedly, with support provided by the family members. Nowadays the family unit is generally much more fragmented and multi-dimensional, very often geographically dispersed. It’s our new reality, our new context.
And so, in increasing numbers, our elderly are faced with a more isolated final pasture, euphemistically known as ‘God’s waiting room’, their daily care often outsourced to strangers unaware of their charge’s predilections and idiosyncrasies, whilst we carry on our busy lives, earning money, bringing up children, pursuing happiness, feeling guilty, battling our inner conflict between me-time and family duty. I sometimes wonder if it’s because there’s such a widespread fear of death – that ultimate of unknowns, our inevitable destiny in this life – that we’ll do anything to avoid a whiff of it in the staleness of an unloved parental living room.
I live very near an old people’s home, where the short walk to the Post Office represents for many their one big event of the day, and the civil ‘Good Morning’ and polite smile as they pass you on the street, often the only human contact they’ll get until the next sunrise. Much is made in the press of the silent depression within in this age group, many suffering loneliness, isolation, bereavement stress, alcoholism and drug abuse. Is that so surprising when everything about us is geared up to be part of a social network, something bigger than just the self – family, community, a sense of purpose and belonging?
Lying ahead for many elderly people when they are in ill health, infirm or incapacitated, is a mere existence; a life of staring at the wall, the clock, the tv, with only their memories as companions or tormentors. So what kind of human connection are we really accepting for our elders? What levels of care, support, dignity and respect? Is this the way to treat humanity? Complex questions, I know, but they need to be asked and addressed because we disregard all this, our responsibility, at our peril.
For this will be us one day, sooner or later – and there’ll be increased competition for resources to support us given the demographic dip that we’ve known about for decades but have conveniently acted like ostriches to ignore. As we reap so shall we sow – and we’ll have no-one but ourselves to hold accountable. Time to take responsibility for our elders, for ourselves and for the generations that follow.